Trauma Sites - A Matter of Distance

This week’s theme of Creating Sites of Memory turned out to be a particularly powerful one. I found Patrizia Violi’s Trauma Site Museums and Politics of Memory to give a well-rounded look at memorial architecture. For me,  it really helpful to look at two completely different trauma sites and learn more about how they were designed, but more importantly why certain decisions were made.

Before reading Violi’s article, I was not really familiar with the Cambodian Genocide. I felt like reading about the trauma site with little background information or historical context on the actual genocide put me in a similar position as the museum visitor.  I say this because I think we are all used to walking into a museum and being handed a pamphlet with information or reading plaques along the walls as we explore. With the Tuol Sleng Museum of the Crimes of Genocide, however, very little informational material is made available to museum visitors. My first reaction to this lack of material was a surprised, ‘well that makes no sense.’ As I read more about the way the museum is laid out, that decision started to make a lot more sense to me, and I think the fact that it is designed to be more of an immersive experience than a historical knowledge transfer is a really powerful choice. Empathy is getting harder and harder to come by in our society where we hide behind computers and text or email instead of calling. For this reason, to be able to leave a museum with a real feeling of what these victims endured is a special thing.

The Villa Grimaldi in Chile seems to take the exact opposite approach to its trauma site. Whereas very similar events took place in both the Villa Grimaldi and Tuol Sleng, the ways in which their memorial sites are commemorated could not be more different. The Park for Peace at the Villa Grimaldi seeks to create a distance from the actual events. From the description Violi provides, it seems entirely possible to be in the Park for Peace and have no idea that anything horrific ever happened on site. Obviously there are political reasons behind the design of the park given that the democracy in Chile had only recently been established when the park was built, but regardless, it makes me wonder if this quieter approach to memorialization means as much. As Violi describes it, you have to really know about the Park for Peace in order to seek it out, as it is not publicized as an attraction of any kind. Aside from the political factors, I wonder if the difference in trauma site approaches between the Villa Grimaldi and Tuol Sleng could be a result of cultural differences to the reaction to such traumatic events.

Overall, Violi really seemed to circulate around the idea of distance. Is it better to have a memorial site that evokes a feeling of closeness to the victims or create distance from the trauma? Does it depend on the culture of the trauma site?